


The Motherland

by 1000001nights



Series: Black Widow: Red Ledger [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-01
Updated: 2015-09-01
Packaged: 2018-04-18 12:02:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4705322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1000001nights/pseuds/1000001nights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Following the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Black Widow: Red Ledger picks up as Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson, and Natasha Romanoff hunt for the missing Bucky Barnes. During this hunt, Nat takes the time to tell Steve about her history, of her time in the infamous Red Room, and her transformation into the deadly Black Widow. But is Natasha’s past as far behind her as she thinks..?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Motherland

Natasha Romanoff was sitting in a Starbucks, just off Beacon Hill near the centre of Boston. She hadn’t had time to reflect on what had brought her to a franchise coffee shop of all places, being the kind of person she was. Natasha had been many things in her life. SHIELD agent. Assassin. Spy. Avenger, most recently and most important of all. None of those things waited in coffee chains, ordering tea for one. The strangeness of it had yet to fully dawn on her, and part of her hoped that it wouldn’t, not completely. She didn’t need another worry, another thing to overanalyze. For the time being, she was waiting, and that was enough to occupy her mind.

        Outside, the afternoon was crisp and cool with the coming fall, and beyond the window to her right, Nat could see the grey-green leaves slowly turning from yellow to orange to red. In front of her, a paper cup of tea was resting on the table. She had not yet taken a sip of it. She was waiting. She’d been waiting for what felt like a long time, and the tea was probably cold. But she tried not to think about it. Anxiously, she scanned the room one more time.

        Out of habit, Natasha had chosen a seat where she could press her back into a corner, making sure she had the clearest view of the only door, and good sightlines through both sets of windows, which ran the length of the walls on either side of her. From where she sat - back straight, body tense - she knew exactly where to go to find cover, how to retaliate, exactly who could be a threat, which civilians she could save, which were expendable, which would provide an adequate distraction if she needed to get away when something happened…  _if_  something happened, she reminded herself. This was Boston. She was an _Avenger_. She was safe.

        Nervously, she drummed her nails on the table. Red, a voice echoed in her head. It sounded like her own. Her nail polish was red. That was all. She shifted the cup of tea, almost picked it up, then thought otherwise; it was, she felt, no longer warm. She’d been waiting a long time.  _Have I?_  asked a voice in her head; she checked her watch.  _No_ , she thought,  _tea just gets cold fast_. Steve was only a few minutes late.

        It was Natasha who had asked Steve to meet alone. They’d spent so much time together, it felt strange to say alone. But Sam was always somewhere nearby, and Fury was always whispering in their ear from some far-off part of the world. She needed a break from it all. Steve needed a break, probably more than anyone. A piece of his past had not only resurfaced, it was alive… If Nat had known… She put the thought from her head. There was another reason she had asked for the meeting. She wanted to - _needed_  to - get something off her mind. This was her chance, to explain, to make sure he understood, but she was still not sure how to go about doing that, and it was not helping that he was late. She shifted her tea again, and set herself back to looking over the other patrons. Laptops. Couples. Half-finished scones. _No danger_ , Nat reminded herself. She breathed, and tried not to think about her watch.

        Steve arrived a few minutes later, scanning the shop with that half-stunned look he often wore, as if everything around him was still an unfathomable surprise. She waved him over when he spotted her, her bright red hair flaming in the sunlight. He looked like a tourist. Captain America looked like a tourist. Nat smiled. The blue jacket, the khakis, the shoulder bag he insisted on carrying, the Red Sox hat, all combined to create that image of a quintessential out-of-towner. None of it compared to the lost look on his face, however. That’s what really gave him away, a man out of his element, out of space, out of time.  _He_  is  _lost_ , Natasha thought.  _I can sympathize_. He sat opposite her, and nodded respectfully. Nat smiled.

        “It must kill you to wear that hat,” she said. “At least you know they suck now, right?”

        “Is it too much?” Steve asked. “I thought, you know, blend in. I was never much of a baseball fan.” Natasha faked a horrified gasp, and Steve looked away awkwardly. “Should I… I dunno. Get something? Are we going to be here long?”

        “Well my tea is cold,” Natasha said. Steve immediately got to his feet. “Can I get you something?” he asked.

        “Slow down captain,” Natasha smiled. “I’ll get it myself. You go ahead first. I can wait a minute longer.”

        “It’s no trouble,” Steve said. Natasha smiled and shook her head, and he nodded and got into line. She knew he’d get her something anyway. She would never be able to dissuade him from doing that. It was in him, just the way he was. Captain America, she thought, imagining the old crowds cheering the name in unison. If only they knew…

        She watched Steve as he stood in line, his hands intertwining restlessly like the rest of them, commuters and bankers and stock brokers and politicians and teachers and servicemen. None of them knew who Steve was, or what he did, just as he didn’t know anything about them. A funny twist of fate, Natasha thought. He’d saved them, more times than they could possibly know. He’d kept their lives calm and comfortable, and he would keep doing it, for as long as he could. Until it kills him, Nat suspected. He stood there in line with all the other people, their dull faces turned to their phones, searching for a quiet moment amidst what they saw as the chaos of their lives.  _Nobody knows a hero when they see one_ , Nat reflected.  _Guess you can’t tell an Avenger just by looking. Lucky me._

        Steve returned a minute later with two cups in hand. “People take their coffee seriously nowadays,” he said. “Coffee used to be this thing you hated drinking, but you did it to keep warm, or stay awake on a long night. I always hated coffee.”

“What’d you get?” Natasha asked, as Steve slid over a cup of tea for her. This one was steaming.

        “Coffee,” he said, taking a tentative sip. Nat laughed to herself. “How will Sam ever last without us?” she asked.

        “You think we should go back?” Steve asked.

         "No,“ Nat said, "it’s fine. It was a joke.”

        “Oh,” Steve replied casually, taking another loud sip of his coffee. “So you got here alright. I almost got lost. When you left the safehouse, I didn’t think it would be this hard to find. ‘Meet me at the place,’ used to mean just, you know, one of them. Do you know how many Starbucks I turned into before I found you?”

        Nat shook her head. “Well,” Steve continued, “a lot. But you said before you left that you wanted to talk about something.”

        “Yeah,” Nat replied. The words were thick in her throat, or maybe her throat was just closing. The moment had come, and she wasn’t ready. “You remember… Well, you weren’t there. You were on a helicarrier.”

        “The Triskellion?”

        "Yeah,” Nat said. “Pierce, he… before it all went down, we leaked everything. All SHIELD’s secrets. We had to. Nick agreed. To take away Pierce’s leverage, steal Hydra’s trump card from them.”

        “I read the brief,” Steve said, “sound likes you really put yourself on the line for the mission in there. You did good work.”

        “Um… Yeah,” Nat said. She was flustered. That was not the response she wanted. “No I… I mean, thanks, but that’s not… Look, just stop being the captain for a minute, okay? I don’t want to talk about the mission. I want to talk about what it means.” The door opened, and Natasha breathed slowly. She felt the crispness of the fall air, the chill of long ago filling her lungs. It was time, and she wasn’t ready.

        “When I released SHIELD’s files, I released everything they had on me. Everything I did for them, and everything from… before. Pierce thought it mattered to me. Thought he could goad me into stopping if he told me that’s what it all meant. Even at the hearing, the court thought… it doesn’t matter. I made peace with my past. I know what I did, and it doesn’t bother me anymore. It’s done. But… seeing as my secrets are out there now, I thought I’d just tell you the story. So you could hear it from me. I guess there’s more than one way of seeing the story of my past. I’d rather you get my version.”

        “Okay,” Steve said, sounding official. “I like to know my team.” Nat smiled, but she rolled her eyes. There was no getting through whatever armour he wore, that first and last line of defence that turned him into Captain America. She brushed by it. “I’d like to start from the beginning, if that’s okay with you.” The door opened again, and Nat felt herself shiver, though whether it was from the chill or the memories, she wasn’t sure. “Sure thing,” Steve asked. “You cold?”

        “No, it’s fine,” Natasha said, “I’m used to being cold.”

 

_Russia, 1999_

        Its name is The Motherland Calls. My first memory of Volgograd was being underneath that huge statue. It’s in the middle of this square, the  _mamyev kurgan_ , and it’s huge. Massive. Some say the tallest statue in the world. I don’t know about any of that, but it’s the first thing I remember about that place. I was underneath it, looking up at this great, grey, screaming woman. In one arm, she’s holding a sword, pointing it up at the sky, her other arm pointing off into the distance. Her face is twisted into this battlecry, like she wants to kill somebody. That’s the first thing I always remember. That’s the face I see in my mind when I think of home. Not the heat in the summer, or the cold in the winter. Volgograd got both. Russia isn’t this snowy wasteland like people think it is. Some places get hot. Volgograd was one of them. Stuck between the Black Sea and the Caspian, it’s almost tropical. It used to be called Stalingrad, back when the USSR was still around. I never knew that city. I never knew that world. Even though one half of the city was concrete grey, and the other half was communist red, I never knew a world where Russia was at war with the rest of the planet. All I knew was that statue, and life in the alleys between buildings, where nobody wants to look.

        I was fourteen at that time, the time I remember looking up at that statue and thinking, why does that woman need to fight? At least I think I was fourteen. I didn’t celebrate a real birthday until I arrived in America, and even still I can’t see the point. I had no home then, no parents. I had friends, but not the kind that wouldn’t sell me for a hot meal. Just that kind, more rats than people. None of it really mattered to me. I was numb to it most of the time. I don’t mean to paint this image of a shrivelled kid huddling under threadbare blankets in the snow. It wasn’t like that. It’s not like it is in the movies. It’s worse, in a lot of ways. In most ways. Movies have a happy ending.

        Life on the streets was a constant struggle. You fight for warmth when it’s cold, for cool when it’s hot. You fight to eat when you’re hungry, or sometimes when you’re not, but you know that you will be. You fight to survive. Sometimes, you just fight. By that time, by fourteen, I knew how to fight. I’d lived for years like that, escaping each orphanage I was snatched up and put into. It was almost worse there. There was still fighting, just not the kind I was good at. It was better to be on the streets, where fighting meant getting by on your own muscle, your own will, your own schemes.

        I fought a lot. I fought whenever I had to, everyone and anyone I had to. I fought people I knew, people I thought were my friends. We fought for food, for shelter, we fought because it kept us warm, or kept our minds clear. I fought the police when it was necessary, to get away, to stay out of jail, of orphan homes, of the grave. They would come, in pairs, with sticks that rattled your bones. They kicked me like they kicked stray dogs. They broke ribs. I lost teeth too early. All of it was part of the fight. And each fight made me stronger.

        Once, I fought a soldier. He was young, some kind of new recruit, and I beat him so bad he couldn’t get up to chase me. I remember his buddies laughing as I ran away. The wind in my face, their jeering in my ears. You got beat by a little girl. I didn’t know what that meant, then. I was as tough as any of them. I knew that the only person I could depend on was myself, and I grew to trust in myself, in my skills, in my desire to fight, to win, to survive. Those streets were cold, hot, wet, dry, and grey - everything was grey, except where it was red - but most of all, they were where I fought. They were where I was beaten. They were where I came out stronger. Where I won. That is my earliest memory. And that is where my story starts. That’s where he found me.

 

        His name was Ivan Petrovich. He worked for the government, or at least that’s what I thought back then. He saw me, and my life changed. To this day, I think it was because of my red hair. It’s uncommon in Russia, and though it wasn’t so bright back then, it was enough to catch an eye. I’d used it to my advantage before, to get sympathy from vendors with scraps they were going to throw away, or to distract someone I wanted to steal something from. It had its advantages, and never more than on that day.

        He pulled up in the cleanest car I’d ever seen, a black limo that stretched on for what felt like an entire block. He stepped out of the back of the car, and I shied away. I knew not to trust people like him, especially men. I knew what men wanted with girls. Lots of girls I knew before thought they could get them to pay for it, but one by one, they all disappeared. 'To America,’ people sometimes said. I knew that was a lie. None of them ever came back, and where they went wasn’t anyplace good. But Ivan was different. He seemed different, then. He didn’t ask anything of me. His shoes clacked cleanly on the cracked pavement. He spoke gently. His voice was low but soft. His accent was clean, not provincial. He sounded like a man from the capital, the kind of man the posters wanted you to trust. He gave me a blanket to keep warm, without me even asking. He offered me food right there on the street. I can still taste it. A beet. They were everywhere, the easiest thing to steal. But this was fresh. Clean. It spurted when I bit into it. The juice ran red like blood down my chin. He saw I was small, and sickly, but strong despite everything. “Are you hungry?” he asked. “Would you like something more?”

        I nodded.

        He took me to a restaurant that first night, and bought me a meal. That was the first hot meal I ever remember having. He was kind to me. I’ll never forget that.

        Ivan was an older man, probably old enough to be my grandfather, if I had ever had that kind of thing. He wore a trimmed silver-and-slate beard, which pointed and curled at his chin. His eyes were cold like frosted glass, but when he smiled they lit up so brightly. He had all his teeth, and they were straight and clean and white. That was new to me, it was all new to me. His coat was clean and fine, made of some kind of warm, insulated wool that I envied thoroughly. His hands were big and rough, like he worked a difficult trade, but I never saw Ivan work a day in his life.

        That first night, after he’d fed me, given me a blanket and a new coat, and shown me kindness - genuine kindness, for maybe the first time in my life -  it was no surprise that I went home with him when he asked. I didn’t know what to expect, but if he wanted what all the other girls said men wanted, I would have been ready to give it to him after that day. If he promised more, I didn’t know what I’d do. But he didn’t. He didn’t ask for anything else. He offered me a bed - my own, not his - and let me sleep in peace. My door locked - my door, something I’d never had before - and I made sure it didn’t open in the night. No one even touched it. I slept peacefully for the first time, and after that, I knew that whatever came of my life from then on, I owed it to Ivan Petrovich.

        Ivan’s apartment was a penthouse in one of the tallest buildings in Volgograd. It was a place of opulence, even to my skewed perspective of wealth and power. Nothing there wasn’t expensive, or very fine. He had two couches in his living room, and a television in almost every room of the flat. His bathroom was carved from marble; marble counters, marble floors, marble in the shower, which had a head that changed settings to get you clean in different ways. I got clean in every way I knew how, and in some ways I didn’t. I ate for the first time without worrying when I’d eat next. Ivan let me taste his vodka, and I felt like a true Russian. I can’t drink the stuff to this day, but back then, it burned inside me so good, in a way that filled the emptiness of all those lonely years. In two weeks, I had meat on my bones. My muscles used to be thin and stringy, like a stray cat’s, but after two weeks with Ivan, I could barely see them anymore. He saved me. He treated me like family. I was all he had, and he was all I had. I never asked why he took me in. I learned later. But then, I was just happy not to starve. But I missed one thing. I missed the fighting.

        So, when Ivan asked if I wanted to help him with something, a project of his, I could only say yes. It was all I wanted to do, to begin repaying a debt I knew I could never fully repay.

        “It’s a program for girls like you,” he said. I had never spent much time with other girls, but the thought was exciting. I followed him down from the apartment and into his limo, in my new dress, in proper shoes, my hair washed and combed and brushed. It fell to my shoulders still, in burning, cascading tangles. “You’ll fit right in,” Ivan said. “You are just what this program is looking for.”

        “What is it?” I asked him, as the car began to pull through the streets. It was threatening to rain that day, and the sky was churning with grey waves. 

        “Tell me, Natalia,” Ivan said, “do you like to dance?”

        “Never tried,” I said.

        “Never? I love dancing,” Ivan smiled. He smiled a lot, those days. “I should take you to the  _Tsaritsynskaya_  to see the ballerinas. Oh, they are beautiful Natalia. Would you like to see them?”

        “Girls in pink dresses?” I asked. “Why would I want to see that…”

        “They are not what you think, Natalia,” Ivan said. Outside, the thunder grumbled in the distance. “They are strong. You must be strong to be a good ballerina.  _Prochnost_ ,” he said, making a fist with either hand. “Like you. I think you would make a very good ballerina.”

        “I guess,” I said. I looked down at my shoes, and clicked the toes together. The leather made a comforting sound. “Do I have to?”

        “Only if you like it, Natalia. But I promise that you will.”

        “Okay,” I said. “What’s it called?”

        “The Red Room,” Ivan said. “Just like your hair. You like red, don’t you? It’s perfect for you.”

        “Okay,” I said. “I’ll see.”

        “Good girl, Natalia,” Ivan said. He folded his arms and leaned back in his seat. “I promise it will all work out for you.”

        The car sped on, drifting on into the haze in the distance, where the rain was starting to pour.


End file.
